NYPD Blew It: The 10 Best Pictures From The NYPD’s Epic Twitter Fail

The New York Police Department apparently heard that The Twitter is all the rage with the youngsters, so some geniuses in NYC’s Finest social media department decided they’d get #myNYPD trending. This went about as well as you would think it would.

From spying on muslims to fighting firefighters at hockey games – and that’s just in the last two weeks – the NYPD hasn’t been doing so well in the public relations department. Technology, though, holds endless possibilities, so who’s to say that a good Twitter campaign can’t put some soft focus onto the image of the NYPD?

The denizens of Twitter, that’s who; they said it loud and clear after the @NYPDnews account tried to turn #myNYPD viral.

It started innocently enough, with the NYPD’s social media arm asking followers to tweet pictures of themselves interacting with NYPD officers. Presumably, the social media wizards thought this would result in shots of photogenic cops helping equally photogenic grandmothers across the street. They forgot that most basic of maxims: the Internet is serious business.

As Ad Week points out, the interwebs wasted no time in hijacking #myNYPD to its own devices. Check the #myNYPD hashtag now, and you’ll find a panoply of images of apparent police brutality. There are shots of cops pulling hair, frisking dogs, wielding batons, and grimacing at the camera.

Definitely not the social media response the #myNYPD hashtag was meant to generate, and definitely not the sort of thing that’s going to stop any time soon. In the few minutes it took us to type up these few paragraphs of snark, more than 100 new posts popped up on Twitter, and not one of them is positive. The best thing we could find referenced the fictional NYPD of New York Undercover, mid-nineties cop drama on Fox starring Malik Yoba and Michael DeLorenzo.

We’re betting the NYPD has learned its lesson with the #myNYPD hashtag, but one holds out hope that, say, the LAPD could follow its lead. Maybe something with Vine, though. Or Instagram. Blue uniforms + Hefe filter = Swoon. In any case, for schadenfreude… er… for posterity, we’ve selected 10 of our favorite #myNYPD photos:

Oh, no, wait! We found a positive one!